Around the Web: Elsevier vs. Academia.edu vs. Researchers

This is a tale of two companies and a bunch of not-so-innocent bystanders.

Both Elsevier and Academia.edu are for-profit companies in the scholarly communications industry. Elsevier is a publisher while Academia.edu is a platform for scholars that, among other things, allows them to post copies of their articles online for all the world to see.

Both are trying to make money by adding value within the scholarly communications ecosystem. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There is plenty of room within that ecosystem for all kinds of players, both for-profit and non-profit. It's all about the value you bring to the table. It's about whether or not you contribute to the overall health of the ecosystem or are a parasite.

On the one hand Elsevier is completely justified in enforcing their author agreements. I also have little sympathy for Academia.edu. They are a for-profit company that certainly understands exactly what their customers are doing. On the other hand, this is a stark reminder to authors just who owns their research outputs. It's not the researchers, it's not the repositories where they might post copies of their articles. It's the publishers like Elsevier who own their research outputs.

Authors are caught between these two for-profit companies, one a massive dinosaur trying to protect its profit margins as it recalibrate to a new, more open world. The other a nimble start-up, trying to be a part of that new world. The road to that new world is full of bumps and false starts and blind alleys. Hopefully Elsevier and Academia.edu's troubles will help raise awareness about the fundamental unfairness of the current scholarly communications ecosystem.

Authors, if you don't want to get caught in the middle of this kind of struggle, don't sign away your copyright to publishers. There is another way.

This site, Academia.edu, is kind of nifty, but it'll be even niftier when more people join up. It's a web page that indexes academics, displaying them and their affiliations in a tree diagram. Play with it, if you're one of us, sign up, and if you know a professor, let 'em know about it.

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Nothing like a little chain rattling to remind the surfs that they may have a PhD, or three, but they are still just the hired help.

This is great for institutional repositories or subject based repositories that are not for profit. I hope that researchers value open access to their research enough to self-archive in these other venues.

Elsevier may have enough clout with take-down notices to 3rd-party service providers like academia.edu, ResearchGate or (its own!) Mendeley (and might be able to weather the fierce backlash blizzard that will now follow) -- but not if they try it with authors or institutions self-archiving the refereed final drafts of their own research output.

This latest incident is yet another cue to push worldwide for the adoption of immediate institutional deposit mandates (and the repositories' automated copy-request Button) by all research institutions and funders.

Since 2004 Elsevier formally recognizes their authors' right to do immediate, unembargoed OA self-archiving of their refereed final drafts (not the Elsevier PDF version of record) on their institutional websites.

And even if they ever do try to rescind that, closed-access deposit is immune to take-down notices.

(But I don't think Elsevier will dare arouse that global backlash by rescinding its 9-year-old policy of endorsing unembargoed Green OA by Elsevier authors -- they will instead try to hope that they can either bluff authors off with their empty double-talk about "systematicity" and "voluntariness" or buy their institutions off by sweetening their publication big-deal on condition they don't mandate Green OA…)

The latest move by academia.edu is that now, they only list those of a user's articles that have actually been uploaded to their own website where before, it was possible to just enter the citation and get it listed. I see this and the conflict above as part of an increasing trend to directly compete with rather than supplement the offerings of publishers. They're no longer acting as a gateway to those publications by a user published elsewhere. Because they are structured on the basis of personal profiles, that means there is a strong incentive for people who use the platform at all to publish all their research there, as otherwise their profile may end up looking sparse or skewed. Their user base is now six million. While I'm critical of publishers and the extent to which they make a profit not only from research but also from free peer reviewing etc by academics, academia.edu driving out academic publishers would not, in my opinion, be good news. They are, ultimately, not a non-profit organisation and they have not, so far, been very transparent on their future business model. Depositing seems a good way, but isn't actually available in all countries...

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